The sublime beauty and the danger of physics is that sometimes things exist that we can never see. Which led scientists to ask: Was an unknown object, perhaps a cosmic string, weird one-dimensional defects in space-time that should be out there, somewhere, detected at the Milky Way’s galactic center in 2016? If yes, it could have profound implications for understanding gravity, space-time and the universe itself.
An unknown object, perhaps a cosmic string, was detected at the Milky Way’s galactic center in 2016 that could have profound implications for understanding gravity, space-time and the universe itself. Cosmic strings, galaxy-sized filaments of raw energy, may be threaded through spacetime, according to some theories. At the Big Bang, our universe exploded into being, expanded at a fantastic speed and cooled, perhaps cracking the fabric of the universe with hairline fractures.
